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Comment by gfodor | Hacker News Reader

The giant asterisk with B2D is that you probably need a service component. There is a reason that github, mixpanel, etc, are all hosted services and not standalone apps.

Selling developer apps that are not coupled with some proprietary, hard to replicate service is risky because you are serving your entire dish to chefs who may just decide they don't like paying for it and would like to just make it themselves (and even give it away for free.)

There are plenty of opportunities for innovation in standalone tooling (like editors and code factoring tools) but outside of the Microsoft ecosystem it seems to be an uphill battle to get adoption of commercial software on developers' desktops. Maybe this will change.

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I think there's a simpler reason for this. The criticism that developers might just copy your software doesn't change for SaaS. Github doesn't need to be SaaS, it's just sold that way, and plenty of Github-clones have arisen.

I think there's a much simpler reason standalone software is a rare beast outside business and enterprise: piracy. It's an odd world where Oracle database can be freely downloaded but IntelliJ requires a license and a videogame requires Steam or an App Store or something. The broad pattern in standalone software is the more consumer-oriented the software, the more barriers to piracy there are in place.

The difference is that Oracle's customers are easier to sue. Oracle makes its money selling five-figure server licenses and piracy is no threat, even if the pirate gets some utility off the software. Heck, the pirate might eventually be forced to buy a license if he locks himself in. On the other side of the market, the piracy rates on consumer software are astronomical--as in 90% being a typical piracy rate that I've heard--and pirates go overwhelmingly unpunished. SaaS fixes the problem by ensuring the consumer never has a physical copy to steal.

I'm not following your point. By your own admission, installed software in the enterprise is not as affected by piracy, so it seems to back up my point that there must be some other factor that prevents a commercial, installed application ecosystem to flourish in the developer tools sector.

I still think the service-oriented nature of github has a large effect. It's one thing for a open source clone of github to exist, it's another thing if it's something that IT needs to install and manage in your organization. On the other hand, your text editor, debugger, etc, are all things that IT doesn't care about beyond if it is installed and runs. So, the value of B2D is beyond the functionality of the tools per se but it's also the additional benefit of not having to run the service yourself to get its benefits. If that additional benefit were missing, the github-clones would thrive because they would be very close to equivalent in terms of time/cost/reward tradeoff for all members of an organization.

Totally disagree. The reason GitHub is a SaaS is because that's the most effective way to solve the problem. The problem with hosting git yourself is the hosting git. Then you have to worry about getting a machine from IT, and security patches on the server, and backups and ...

Sorry, perhaps this wasn't clear in my post. B2D (Business 2 Developer) refers to SaaS being sold to developers.

the title/url would be a good place for that kind of clarification.

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